Spike Jonze joined Sundance's opening-night madness on Thursday, debuting his brand-new short I'm Here as part of the festival's rock-solid Shorts Program One. Which sounds a little yawnily non-descript, I know, until you break its four terrific films down as the ones by a former Oscar nominee, two future Oscar nominees, a Kennedy clan representative and Sweden's bright new hope -- all of whom were on hand, with Jonze weighing in on video after the jump.
I'm Here is the 30-minute result of a partnership between Absolut Vodka and Jonze, who somehow correlated a bittersweet love story between two robots with the Scandinavian booze monolith. A patron is a patron, I suppose, and it certainly doesn't affect the quality of Jonze's work: Andrew Garfield stars as Sheldon, a robot whose lonely yet resolutely cheerful life attempts to contradict the second-class citizenry of his "species" populating Los Angeles. Awaiting the bus one day, he espies Francesca (Sienna Guillory), a cute mechanoid giddily, illegally driving down the same street. "You can't drive a car!" an old woman shouts at her -- mostly out of instinct, it would seem, angry about nothing in particular but the upset of so.cial order. It's hard to tell exactly to what extent Jonze is sending up L.A.'s ethnic discord; Sheldon lives one step removed from the slums where the alien prawns were sequestered in District 9, and the ordeals these ultra-humanized, emotional robots are subjected to -- grief, embarrassment and ultimately love -- seem to implicate the inhumanity of their flesh-and-blood counterparts.
Yet Jonze soon tamps down that tension, opting instead to pursue a pretty straightforward romance between Sheldon and Francesca. Their meet-cute occurs after another, not-so-chance meeting on the road; their courtship unfolds in the white light of deserted parking lots, the honey-tinged hue of dusk and, hilariously, in Sheldon's bed, where the sexual chemistry is literally electric. Jonze still has never met an emo-folk montage he doesn't like, and heading toward its midpoint, I'm Here may not have made it out of this twee purgatory alive were it not for the extraordinary presence of these characters -- their animated eyes as suggestive as anything in Avatar, their bodies with the loose, limber spirit that accompanies new love. When Sheldon, a librarian played by an actor wearing a huge, blocky mask, cheerfully tosses a book behind his back and catches it with his free hand, it's just one of those miniscule Jonzeian treasures that you take for granted in a world seemingly full of them.
Speaking last night about the character design in particular, Jonze explained his primary instructions to the designer:
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And then, the downturn. As with most short films (especially Jonze's) it's not what you expect, and not when you expect it. And you won't read specifics here. But for a film underwritten by a vodka manufacturer, I'm Here features some pretty subsersive bits of body horror and despair. It's perhaps mitigated some by its last shot, but only because the hope viewers project on these moody, earnest machines. Yet for a cohort that could conceivably enjoy eternal life together, the question "At what cost?" is just as loaded as it would be when posed to humans.
"At what cost?" is answered more specifically in the context of The Fence, Rory Kennedy's documentary about the $2 billion fence separating 700 miles of the United States from Mexico. The problem (among others): There are 2,000 miles of border between the two countries. The usually on-the-nose Kennedy starts her survey off as something of a farce: Montages showing huge gaps in the fence where Mexican migrants cross illegally; character sketches of exasperated, down-home border life; and a golf course occupying the no-man's land between a Texas portion of the fence and the Rio Grande ("Please do not hit golf balls into Mexico," blares a nearby sign). But as other implications of the fence become clear -- including its uselessness in our wars on terror and drugs, deadly flooding in Mexico and the separation of animals from their natural feeding habitats -- the scale of its failure grows.
As thorough as Kennedy's study is, it misses an essential factor for any social-issue documentary: Solutions. Neither living with the fence nor tearing it down are explicitly suggested. It just stands there, a monument to both our futility and the desperation of those it seeks to keep out. "They can build a fence," one anonymous migrant says matter-of-factly. "They can build 5,000 fences. There is no obstacle for a Mexican."
Next was Logorama, a mindblowing animated short featuring a Los Angeles composed entirely of brands, logos and other commercial iconography. The GOP elephant is kept in a zoo, the Pillsbury doughboy is a short-order cook, and the layered IBM logo is a multi-story office complex downtown. Oh, and wanted criminal Ronald McDonald just kidnapped Bob's Big Boy after a high-speed pursuit by a couple of foul-mouthed, undercover-cop Michelin men. It moves and feels like something Michael Mann would have filmed, swinging from handheld shots to aerial views to low, wide chase sequences; the aesthetic is impeccable. Its conclusion -- that all these brands may have a graver effect than anyone could have anticipated -- seemed less underdeveloped, but you can't argue with this kind of technique. Logorama has already been shortlisted for the Best Animated Short Oscar and will more than likely emerge as a front-runner after the nominations are announced in two weeks.
Finally we had Seeds of the Fall, Swedish director Patrik Eklund's absurdist comedy about a middle-aged couple, a diabetic tractor driver, a paralyzed neighbor, and the carpenter who comes between them. The less said about it the better, except to note that if you've ever wanted to know what a Wes Anderson's attempt to make an Ingmar Bergamn film might look and feel like, this would be it. Seek it out if and when you can.